


and afterwards travelling home

by Hecate



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Developing Friendships, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, IN SPACE!, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Road Trips, Tony Stark Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 07:21:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27179833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecate/pseuds/Hecate
Summary: "Ah, at least you will be with Peter," Tony had said. "Someone who knows how to throw a decent punch."orNebula making her way through space with a pesky human at her side.
Relationships: Nebula & Peter Parker, Nebula & Tony Stark
Comments: 10
Kudos: 95
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	and afterwards travelling home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelicerata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelicerata/gifts).



"You better look after him," Tony says, pointing at Peter who watches them with glee. "Or I let Dummy play with your arm. The left one."

Nebula gives him a blank look.

Tony smirks.

"Your robot won't be able to operate my arm," she finally says. "It lacks the necessary software."

When Tony sputters and laughs, it almost feels like a good kill.

~*~

Gamora and she, they never made jokes.

They made pithy remarks, thinly veiled threats, promises of violence.

Jokes were useless, a waste of time. But then Gamora joined the Guardians, and Nebula went after her. Things were different, after. Lighter, maybe, and yet still tenser.

She left.

She returned.

Gamora greeted her with a smile, Quill with the wave of his hand. No one ever asked why she was there. No one told her to leave.

There were jokes, bad jokes because those were the only ones Quill knew, and there were dumb remarks he and Rocket threw at each other. Sometimes her sister would smile at them, and her face would change, would turn strange and unfamiliar.

It took Nebula a while to start liking the way her sister looked after she met the Guardians.

But she liked it.

And she lost it.

~*~

Tony had asked her about her sister only once.

The ship was still running then, limping through space on dying power cells, their combined skills, and fury.

There had been a lot of fury.

She hadn't told him much, couldn't put it in words – _my sister is dead_ – and Thanos hadn't made her for things like that.

Anger, she understood, but grief was unknowable, untouchable.

Tony never asked again, and she liked him for it.

She granted him his silences in turn, the questions she might have posed about the boy that faded away into ash remaining unasked.

~*~

Peter doesn't take to space easily.

He moves too fast, too wide, never sitting still, never quiet.

He asks questions, too, about the spaceship, so unlike to the Benetar and yet like nothing Peter saw before. He wants to know about the metal it's made of, how the engine is powered, how space and all its vastness open up so easily to them.

He wants to know how they'll find their way.

"We just kinda let the spaceship do its thing when we went after Thanos," he says, words coming fast, mingling together. "And then we crashed."

Nebula looks at him, lets her silence stretch until he bows his head, eyes darting around.

"Sorry," he mumbles.

Even when Tony was bleeding out, when he was starving in front of her, it was easier to travel with him.

~*~

Before Tony, all games she knew were about survival. Throw a knife faster than anyone else, play with minds and fears. She was good at them even when Gamora sneered at her, successful though her father only offered words of disdain.

She was bad at the first game Tony taught her, sitting across from her at the table, his eyes already shadowed with exhaustion. 

There had been patience in this moment, strangely gentle and amused, another new thing, as strange as Quill's jokes. She hadn't liked it, not in the beginning, but she got used to it with every new game Tony tried to teach her.

And when he got slower, grew thin and tired, she knew how to be patient herself.

~*~

Peter is sitting in the small room they use to eat, a shared place she never had on her spaceships before. Never thought she needed it until the Benatar. Gamora sitting with the rest of the Guardians, the family she made for herself while Nebula was still doing Thanos' bidding.

There are colourful pieces of plastic thrown all over the table, some of them on the ground, dangerously close to Peter's feet. She knows these, has seen Morgan building castles and robots with blinking lights, Tony sitting with her, a proud smile on his face.

"I thought these are for children?" she asks.

Peter looks up, looks defensive for a moment before he grins. "Easy mistake to make."

She walks past the table and goes through their rations, counting every single piece, putting them in the right order again, Peter's curiosity and hunger having displaced some of them. When she turns back, Peter is watching her.

"Want to build something?" he says, pointing at the mess in front of him.

She almost says no. But then, she thinks of Tony, and she sits down across from Peter. Takes two pieces and sticks them together. "Is there a plan for this?"

"Yeah." Peter shrugs. "Sometimes I just like to stick them together and see where I end up."

She looks at the table, chooses another piece. Thinks of walls and windows that open to the world outside. Starts to build.

Peter does the same.

They are silent, the room filled with little clicks, the sound of fabric when they move. Peter getting up and returning with two glasses of water. She almost doesn't notice when he puts one next to her. "Thank you."

He nods.

They go back to building. She has a little room now, with a door and two windows, and multi-coloured walls. Peter seems to be building a car.

"Do you have a favourite movie yet?" he asks, disrupting the silence.

She shakes her head. "Tony gave me a list."

Peter snorts. "Watched Star Wars yet?"

She thinks for a moment, going through the movies she has started and abandoned and the ones she made it through. "No."

"We should watch it when we're back," Peter says. Looks at her. "I mean, if you want to. You don't have to watch movies with me or something, I just thought.."

He is talking too fast again.

"I can watch movies with you," she says just to stop him.

"Cool," Peter says.

Under her hands, her room grows, turns into a house. Peter's car moves on its own across the table, Peter holding some kind of remote control in his hand. It stops next to her hand. When she looks at the car, the last two pieces are sitting on its roof. She picks them up, puts them into place. Her house has a chimney now.

"I always wanted siblings," Peter says.

Nebula thinks of meeting Gamora, that little child Thanos chose first, and she has no answer for him.

~*~

"So she is alive," Tony had said, standing in the middle of what was left of the Avengers Compound, shattered concrete and fire and mud.

She didn't look at the ruins, didn't think about the room she had there, the little space on Earth she returned to again and again. A bed, a cupboard, a chair by the window. A shelf that slid out of the wall smoothly and without a sound, weapons folded into it in clean rows.

"It's not her," she had said. It was another Gamora, a Gamora that hadn't become her sister yet.

A shrug, Tony crossing the distance between them. "Does it matter?"

She hadn't answered, and Tony had stayed with her until she turned away from the battlefield.

~*~

They walk into the bar her contact had directed her to, Peter chattering by her side, the sound more familiar than it was days ago.

"Oh wow," she hears him say, "what is that?"

She glances at him, follows his eyes. Sighs.

She didn't use to sigh before she met Tony.

"It's a heater," she says.

Peter looks at her, looks back at the heater, still curious. "Huh."

And for the first time, he truly reminds her of Tony.

~*~

"Unfortunately," Tony had said while they discussed if Peter should come along with her or not, "he sometimes behaves like a puppy. A dumb, overexcited puppy."

"He saved quite a few people," Nebula had answered, even though she didn't really want the boy to come with her. "He saved you." 

For a moment she had returned to that awful moment when Tony had snapped half the universe back into being, his body shutting down. Peter had barrelled into the ruins of the Compound, screaming something about a cradle and nanotech.

A small smile, Tony looking wistful, looking proud. "Yeah, he does that, too."

"He wants to see the stars," Tony had gone on. "Who the fuck wants to see the stars."

"This isn't a vacation; this is a mission. There won't be any stargazing or hanging out on beaches."

A sigh, a shrug. "But it's not a dangerous one. Meeting contacts, paying them for that info on your sister. That's not dangerous, right?"

It had been Nebula's turn to shrug.

"Ah, at least you will be with him," Tony had said. "Someone who knows how to throw a decent punch."

She thinks of that when someone rises up with a shout of her father's name, shooting at her, the laser fire hitting Peter instead of her.

~*~

Back when it had been Tony and her, she hadn't known how to touch him.

Not while they we're still in space, the engines as quiet and dead as the black around them, and not later, after they were saved.

She still had to, his blood slippery beneath her finger, his body worryingly frail when she had helped him to leave the spaceship.

She doesn't know what to do with Peter now, not even after sewing Tony back together.

Tony had lost him before he met her.

She can't lose him a second time.

So she storms out of the ship, she storms back into the city, a data pad in her hand that's guiding her to a clinic. And when she's there, she doesn't beg, she doesn't ask for help. Instead, she puns a gun against a doctor's head and she pulls him with her.

~*~

"It's not like I never got hurt before," Peter says, and there is a carelessness in his words that feels familiar. "I heal."

Then he reaches out, wraps his fingers around her wrist, his grip surprisingly strong. "You got the data thingie?" And he looks worried, almost frantic.

It takes her a while to understand that he worries for her, worries that she lost what they came for.

"Yeah," she finally says. "I got it."

He smiles, and his hand goes slack, hits the bed. "That's good."

"Yes," Nebula replies, and wonders if the information is worth this moment, Peter pale and sweating, his leg wrapped in a white bandage.

"When we're home," he says, "we're watching Star Wars." A groan, his eyes closing. "And we gonna eat so much ice cream."

~*~

Tony had only told her about the Avengers once they made it back to Earth. Had told her how they fought together, how they stopped and started fighting each other instead.

It had bothered her, that idea. That you could find something like this and lose it just like she lost Gamora. It had felt useless, a waste of time and grief. 

And still, she had fallen into the same trap that her sister found herself in, that had killed her. The Guardians. The Avengers. Interchangeable for all the mistakes Gamora and she made for them.

And still...

And still.

~*~

Tony waits for them in front of the Avengers Compound when they land, hand raised in greeting. Nebula raises her own arm briefly before turning back to Peter, remaining by his side as he limps down the ramp and towards Tony.

"You," Tony addresses her. "You and Dummy have a play date."

She shrugs, the feeling more familiar now, and she puts the data stick in Tony's waiting hands, his skin warm and rough. 

"He started it," a line she heard Morgan utter about everything and everyone, and she hears Peter sputter.

"I did not."

Tony raises an eyebrow at her, looking almost confused, and she thinks if it was Gamora standing here instead of her, her sister would attempt a smile.

Instead, she follows Peter into the Compound, the promises of ice cream and movies she still didn't quite understand luring her in.

At Nebula's side, Tony falls in step with her.


End file.
